My fellow SF fans out there: how many of you are watching Curiosity's exploits on Mars with obsessive excitement? And is anyone else, like me, plunging back in to Kim Stanley Robinson's epic Mars trilogy in a bid to satisfy their suddenly insatiable appetite for all things Martian?

Mars was empty before we came. That's not to say that nothing had ever happened. The planet had accreted, melted, roiled and cooled, leaving a surface scarred by enormous geological features: craters, canyons, volcanoes. But all of that happened in mineral unconsciousness, and unobserved. There were no witnesses – except for us, looking from the planet next door, and that only in the last moment of its long history. We are all the consciousness that Mars has ever had.

So writes Robinson as Red Mars, the first in the trilogy, opens – and God, those books are brilliant. I particularly remember being transfixed by his description of a Martian sunrise: "And then the sky would begin to bleed behind them, high cirrus clouds turning purple, rust, crimson, lavender, and then swiftly to metal shavings, in a rosy sky; and the incredible fountain of the sun would pour over some rocky rim or scarp, and they would search anxiously as they ghosted over the pocked and shadowed landscape." And of Olympus Mons, the largest mountain in the solar system.

I want to be there! But, in the absence of that being a possibility, I suppose I'm going to have to sate my craving with Martian fiction. Anyone got any other favourites they want to share? And any particular quotes that will help bring the red planet to life?